Telestream Automated Solutions Now Meet Latest FCC Captioning Rules

Telestream’s entire suite of captioning, workflow automation and QC products are ready to meet the latest FCC captioning rules. As of July 1, 2017, clips of all live (e.g. concerts, sporting events and news) or near-live programming (e.g. late night talk shows) that are captioned on TV must now be also captioned when posted online. 

OTT Captioning

The new FCC rules now require broadcasters, programmers and content creators to caption video clips within 8 to 12 hours of programming shown live or near-live on television (such as news or sporting events) when these clips are delivered via Internet.

“Due to the tight turnaround time and high volume of content, manual preparation of these files is impractical,” says Giovanni Galvez, Product Manager for Captioning and Subtitling at Telestream. “The only way to effectively turn around volumes of news and sports programming captions to OTT platforms is to rely on tools that automate the process.”

Telestream’s media processing and captioning solutions, including Vantage Timed Text Flip, Lightspeed Live Capture and Vidchecker, allow for automated conversion and delivery of FCC-compliant captioned video files for the Internet. These tools allow broadcasters to capture and begin processing live programs as they’re being broadcast.

Media organizations can use the Vantage Media Processing Platform and Timed Text Flip to transcode captions and subtitles within a single workflow. Vantage can both transcode the file to the necessary formats for OTT delivery, and handle the proper conversion of the master video files such as MXF, MPEG-2, GXF, or ProRes with captioning.

Telestream captioning solutions are able to get live captioned programming to OTT platforms, and have complete international delivery capabilities. All Telestream captioning solutions can handle TTML, IMSC 1.0, SMPTE 2052 Timed Text, and Web VTT files. Telestream software can also export embedded captioning into .mp4 files for OTT delivery.

QC tools such as Telestream Vidchecker ensure that proper captions are embedded in the incoming/source file, and those same tools offer proof that captions are present before delivery to OTT platforms.

For organizations who wish to create captions and subtitles in-house, Telestream’s MacCaption and CaptionMaker captioning software simplify video captioning and subtitling in any digital workflow. MacCaption (Mac) and CaptionMaker (PC) each have easy-to-use user interfaces and features that are designed to automate much of the cumbersome captioning creation process as possible.